Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

A series of gaffes—including Carson's insistence that the pyramids were built not as tombs but for grain storage, and his assertion that none of the founding fathers had held elected office before signing the Declaration of Independence—shook voters' confidence in the Tea Party favorite.

Carson's background came under scrutiny when Politico attempted to poke holes in his claim that he had been offered a full ride to West Point by General William Westmoreland.

Carson and the real estate developer are not so different from one another in this predilection for outrageous utterances, it’s just that one smiles and the other scowls.

This is the same Ben Carson who on a radio show in 2013 said of white liberals:“Well, they’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box — you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

he and the front-runner are two sides of the same coin: they are both dangerous, but one is a narcissist who just might win the nomination and the other is a near-narcoleptic who never had a chance.

While Carson insisted that “there is no way I ran for President,” he did not rule out running for the Republican nomination in the future. “I think I’d be really good at it,” he said.

But the point remains that saying so both belittles a serious issue of violence -- that of men raping other men in prison, which has nothing to do with turning anyone gay and everything to do with criminal activity. And it's a serious lapse in logic. Being around a bunch of dudes -- or ladies -- in prison doesn't change a person's innate sexual attractions.

Trump and Carson are also exchanging shots over religion after Trump told a crowd in Iowa, of Carson's faith

The announcement comes after Carson had a dismal showing in the dozen states that voted on Tuesday, finishing at the back of the GOP field in the race’s early primaries.

Carson maintained a core of support among religious conservatives that gave him hope for a comeback that never materialized.

He stirred controversy in September when he suggested a Muslim shouldn’t be president — a comment that ended up deepening his support on the right.

He raised more money than any of his rivals in 2015 — built on an expensive direct mail and telephone solicitation operation — but burned through most of it by the time the calendar flipped

Yet when various senators asked Carson to weigh in on specific programs that helped their constituents, he consistently pledged to keep them going. That included a rental-assistance demonstration that provides assistance to 4.5 million households, a community-development block grant that will provide $1.6 billion to Americans, including thousands affected by floods in Louisiana, and a program to rid housing of lead hazards. In fact, he said, a program to end veteran homelessness “needs more enhancements.” He also promised to embark on a nationwide “listening tour” to hear more about what needs to be improved at the department.And, despite his own repeated statements to cut down on expenses, he pledged, to the Democrat senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, that he would advocate for a budget for HUD

“Rabin: The Last Day.” Agence France-Presse said the movie, by the renowned Israeli director Amos Gitai, is about “the incitement campaign before the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin” and “revisits a form of Jewish radicalism that still poses major risks.”

Sure, the official investigating commission focused on the breakdowns in Rabin’s security detail, but, Gitai added, “They didn’t investigate what were the underlying forces that wanted to kill Rabin. His murder came at the end of a hate campaign led by hallucinating rabbis, settlers who were against the withdrawal from territories and the parliamentary right, led by the Likud (party), already then headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted to destabilize Rabin’s Labor government.”

I hope a lot of Americans see this film — for the warning it offers to those who ignore or rationalize the divisive, bigoted campaigns of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and how they’re dragging their whole party across civic redlines, with candidates saying, rationalizing or ignoring more and more crazy, ill-informed stuff each week.

Last week another redline was crossed. At a Trump town hall event, the first questioner began: “We got a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. We know he’s not even an American. But anyway. We have training camps brewing where they want to kill us. That’s my question. When can we get rid of them?”Trump responded: “A lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking into that and plenty of other things.”

Trump could have let the man ask his question and then correct his racist nonsense, without blocking his free speech, which is exactly what McCain did in a similar situation

Instead he tweeted: “Christians need support in our country (and around the world), their religious liberty is at stake! Obama has been horrible, I will be great.”

And then, like clockwork, Ben Carson saw Trump blurring another civic redline and leapfrogged him. Carson stated, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

So a whole faith community gets delegitimized and another opportunity for someone to courageously stand up for what’s decent is squandered. But it will play well with certain voters. And that is all that matters — until something really bad happens. And then, all of it — the words, tweets, signs and boasts — will be footage for another documentary that ends badly.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson provide evidence that, for now at least, a large percentage of Republican voters are in a fiercely anti-political mood. As a result, the usual ways voters judge a candidate — experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues — have been devalued.

People are looking for candidates not only to give voice to their anger but to amplify it. Reason has given way to demagogy. In a political context, Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson represent the id rather than the superego, not just in what they say but in how they perceive the world around them.

it will also require Republican voters to lift their sights and raise their expectations about the goals of politics, which are to improve the lives of our fellow citizens in concrete ways; to advance, even imperfectly, liberty, opportunity and a more decent and just society.

I get that it may be emotionally satisfying to cheer on careless rhetoric, to portray every political difference as a “give me liberty or give me death” moment, and to imply that America under Barack Obama is like Germany under Adolf Hitler. But it is also intellectually discrediting, politically self-defeating and unworthy of those who are citizens of a great republic.

One risk of this apparently widespread suspicion is that it could become self-fulfilling. If enough people and businesses believe the economy is secretly terrible, they will behave in ways that make it terrible — by curbing their own spending and hiring, for example. 

This distrust of public data is partly, though not entirely, Trump’s fault.

At times Trump has mused that “real” unemployment is as high as 42 percent , a comically hyperbolic figure

Such comments are part of his broader narrative of numerical nihilism, a political strategy of discrediting any statistic or fact that could obstruct his path to the presidency.

as World’s Worst Surrogate Ben Carson said Friday on MSNBC, “Let’s throw the economists out, and let’s use common sense.” Presumably Carson believes that all forms of expertise, including neurosurgical, should be similarly disposed of in favor of “common sense.”

this anti-intellectual, ignore-the-data attitude mostly owes its growth to a careless, conspiracy-theorizing league of (mostly) conservative politicians and pundits.

They elevated themselves by sowing distrust in traditional institutions and sources of authority, from the media to civil servants to scientists. They presented themselves as the sole truth-tellers, system de-riggers and messianic statistics unskewers, while maintaining that everyone else was feeding the public lies.

The problem with elevating yourself by tearing down the existing authoritative institutions is that once you succeed, you’ve established a road map for others to tear you down, too

This is how a democracy crumbles: not with a bang, but with data trutherism.

This sort of thing also happens to send liberals spinning, since there’s no good way to respond. If you point out that this is just a new way to propagate the lie that Obama is a secret Muslim, you fear giving credence to the idea that there’s anything wrong with being a Muslim in the first place. But if you start by arguing that the anti-Muslim-in-office position is bigoted and unconstitutional, you fear reinforcing the idea that Obama is, indeed, a secret Muslim. After all, why are we debating this thing if it’s not an imminent issue in the real world?

Most disconcertingly for the GOP establishment, the latest poll finds a hefty portion of its electorate, even beyond current Trump supporters, coming around to the idea of Trump as their standard-bearer. Two-thirds of GOP voters said they'd be either enthusiastic or satisfied if he captured the party's nod, while 65% said the brash billionaire had the right temperament to serve as president.

Trump's favorability rating stands at 61% — the best among the field and a nine-point jump from his 52% favorable rating in the October Monmouth poll. Only 29% of Republicans view Trump unfavorably, compared to 33% two months ago

The finding comes amid signs that Trump's call last week for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States is resonating with GOP voters. A Bloomberg Politics poll found that two in three Republicans back the ban, although an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed the Republican electorate more divided. 

What's clear, though, is that after briefly surrendering his national polling lead to Carson, Trump is back on top. Of the 12 national polls conducted since November, Trump has led in all of t hem.

“I think on the committee I’ll have Dr. Ben Carson and some other folks,” Mr. Trump said.

He also questioned why Mr. Kasich, who has been mathematically eliminated from getting the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination

just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.

So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.

It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.

It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.

this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

"The Religious Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," says Ed Dobson, who as an associate pastor at Falwell's church, was present at the founding of the Moral Majority. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.

"In one fell swoop," writes political scientist Corey Robin, "the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect."

Falwell would repudiate his segregationist past and his movement would pivot from race to "family values." Yes, abortion was murder and homosexuality was unnatural. But each also undermined family life.

Trump, who has been married three times and derives his language more from the vulgarities of bathrooms than from the niceties of the pulpit, has also taken stances on key cultural issues, including abortion and gay rights, that are at odds with the Republican Party's white evangelical base.

Other presidenti

al candidates, including Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders, have addressed Liberty stud

With this promise in sight, it seems like a good time to revisit what Falwell Sr. said about King before and after he co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as a "pro-life, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-American" organization.

This ruling stripped tax-exempt status from all-white private schools formed in the South in reaction to the Brown v. Board of Education mandate to desegregate public schools.

Their intent was safeguard children from secularization, not racial integration, but their schools had been unfairly and illegally targeted by a federal government hell-bent on making secular humanism the nation's false faith.

"There was an overnight conversion," recalled Paul Weyrich -- the conservative strategist who coined the term "moral majority" -- as conservative Christians realized that "big government was coming after them as well."

Similarly, feminism was dangerous because it confused the distinct roles men and women and boys and girls were to play in the "traditional family," which Falwell and his fellow travelers understood to be of a singular sort: one male breadwinner and one female homemaker, married, with children, living under one roof and the patriarchal authority of the man of the house.

Nonetheless, he does have a story to tell that resonates not only with white evangelicals' complaints about the decline of a Christian America, but also with the broad contours of the Christian story, which runs from The Fall in Eden to redemption at the hands of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Both of these narratives get going with a fall from grace and point toward an upcoming revival.I know many evangelicals, and Trump is not one of them.

GOP members of Congress who consider Trump an ignorant, narcissistic, lying, authoritarian bully (and according to Bob Corker, many do) face a choice between their principles and their jobs.

In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of The Washington Post enumerated “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one.

Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in The New York Times, the “Senate’s Trump whisperer.

Graham admitted in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”

“if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.”

In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham told him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”

That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham told CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.”

as he and Trump have grown chummier, Graham’s tone has changed. In his Fox interview, Graham twice applauded Trump for recognizing “that we’re in a religious war.” In other words, he applauded Trump for doing exactly the thing Graham has in the past denounced him for doing: defining the war against ISIS as a war against Islam

Graham later explained that, in his mind, this “religious war” is against not Islam per se but merely “a sect in Islam.” But there’s plenty of evidence that Trump doesn’t make such subtle distinctions. Trump said during the campaign, after all, that, “Islam hates us.” He called for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration

Graham is less public about a lot of the issues on which he once opposed Trump. And, as a result, American Muslims seem to have lost one of the few Republicans willing to defend their rights just when they need him most.